Drchrono, a leading electronic health record (EHR) platform provider, and AppMedicine, the company behind AppVisit, a cross-platform software solution that provides mobile communications to the health care industry, have just announced a product integration that they say will increase productivity for health care providers and provide greater health care access to patients. The new drchrono-AppVisit integration makes it possible for both health care providers and patients to have easy access to mobile e-visits and integrated records. AppVisit is one of the first drchrono platform integrations using the drchrono API.

Utilizing smartphone capabilities that let people record video, take pictures, complete questionnaires and fill out medical forms, AppVisit allows patients to receive nonemergency health care without the need for an in-office medical visit. The drchrono platform allows health care providers to collect, retrieve and update patient medical records from any location using a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer. The combination of drchrono's EHR access functionality with AppVisit's mobile communication and virtual care capabilities allows health care professionals to provide personal virtual office visits and treatment to patients from anywhere and at their convenience.

ProgrammableWeb spoke with Daniel Kivatinos, COO and co-founder of drchrono. “AppMedicine has built an incredibly useful app for doctors, so we were excited that they worked quickly on getting this app onto drchrono’s platform," he says. "It helps them to reach more doctors and patients and helps make our platform more valuable.”

According to the press release, studies show that 40% of in-office medical visits can be replaced with e-visits via smartphones and tablets. In addition, the national average for the duration of an in-office visit is 14 minutes. The average time it takes for physicians to complete an AppVisit is less than three minutes, a significant amount of time savings that can be used to provide health care to a greater number of patients.

According to a recent New York Timesarticle, lengthy wait times for general doctor and specialist appointments have become the norm in the United States, and there are significant wait times for many other types of health care providers as well. The best-known example of lengthy wait times for health care appointments in the United States is the Department of Veterans Affairs. In addition to lengthy wait times at VA hospitals, veterans are also grappling with extremely long processing times for VA benefits claims. Last year, ProgrammableWebreported that the Center for Investigative Reporting launched the CIR VA Backlog API, allowing anyone to access VA backlog-related data available in the CIR database.

In addition, most of the major health care reforms of the Affordable Care Act went into effect at the beginning of this year. Technology that boosts health care provider productivity such as drchrono and AppVisit will be essential in the accommodation of the millions of additional people entering the U.S. health care system.

The drchrono-AppVisit product integration will not only help increase the productivity of health care providers and offer greater health care access to patients, but it allows for other real-world use cases. ProgrammableWeb reached out to Lisa Serwin, CEO of AppMedicine, who described some of the real-world applications drchrono-AppVisit could be used for:

Triage for an in-office visit.

Ensuring patients are following doctors' instructions.

Administrative tasks such as making or canceling appointments and completing previsit intake forms.

Following up with patients taking certain types of medications. For example, monitoring for side effects such as depression for patients who are on antidepressants.

Connecting members of the military deployed overseas and at other locations with their doctors back home.

About 300 to 400 developers are working on building applications using the drchrono API, Kivatinos told ProgrammableWeb. The majority of the applications are in sandbox mode and have not yet been released for public use. All applications built using the drchrono API are reviewed and approved before they are released.

“We were able to build so quickly on the drchrono platform thanks to the work drchrono had already completed and the responsiveness of their team," Serwin says. "APIs (with thought and care) are the future of health care."

Drchrono has been busy in recent months. In addition to the launch of the drchrono-AppVisit product integration, the company in June announced the integration of Google Glass with the drchrono platform, creating the "first wearable health record."

For more information about the drchrono platform, visit drchrono.com. To find out more about AppVisit, visit the company website, AppMedicine.com.

See also ProgrammableWeb'sarticle about the launch of the drchrono API.